I have been “mistaken,” “misled,” “misrepresented,” and been “unaccountably in error,”
and am sorry if you have been offended

Sunday, December 02, 2012

Governor Kada’s Third Force Movement Not Going Too Far

Unless a couple of
political scientists that I very much respect are dead wrong, Governor Yukiko
Kada’s new party, which brought new hope to the 61 newly jobless Representatives
seeking to retain their seats and 12 Councillors consisting of Ichiro Ozawa’s
followers and a handful or two of other mostly DPJ refugees who failed to catch
on with any of the more promising Third Force movements, isn’t going anywhere, anytime
soon. Chris Winkler, a scholar at the German Institute for Japanese Studies, made
a persuasive case in an online discussion to the effect that it wouldn’t make
much of an impact because the voters would be making up their minds on the
basis of a variety of reasons and the nuclear question was not particularly decisive.
I was inclined to agree with him and didn’t have much to add by way of argument.
The other political scientist, a Japanese scholar who has observed the governor
more closely, will go unnamed because he was more dismissive of her as a run-of-the-mill
politician who has been all over the place on issues.

The first week of
the Nippon Mirai no To (literally, Party of Japan’s Future) has so far validated
their predictions. Beyond her signature anti-nuclear stance, Kada has basically
adopted Ozawa’s anti-TPP, anti-consumption tax hike posture as well as some of
the expensive 2007/2009 DPJ manifesto items such as the 26,000 yen/month child allowance.
Keeping her day job as governor and appointing a trusted Ozawa ally as her
virtual second-in-command are showing her up as a one-issue figurehead. Even
her anti-nuclear platform—a 2022 deadline for phasing out nuclear power—has come
under significant criticism as unrealistic (or undesirable by pro-nuclear
voices) while no doubt disappointing the hardcore anti-nuclear crowd, who want
the nuclear power plants shut down immediately. Her attempts to explain herself
on the nuclear question has exposed to charges of waffling. This is unfair,
perhaps, since she had never ruled out the possibility of restarting nuclear
reactors that meet the test of new safety standards to be set by the Nuclear
Regulation Commission, and Toru Hashimoto and pro-nuclear Shintaro Ishihara are
still in open disagreement on the nuclear question even after they settled on a
compromise wording for the Japan Restoration Party (JRP) policy platform. However,
Hashimoto and Ishihara both have well-established national reputations for hard-nosed
leadership that transcend any single issue and enable them to weather
individual mishaps. Kada by comparison takes center stage with a much smaller
national profile, making an initial setback on the nuclear issue or the
impression that she is merely a convenient front for Ozawa takeover more
damaging and difficult to counter.

National polls taken
this weekend should leave the NMT at best a distant fourth behind the LDP, DPJ
and JRP. The announcement of a full-fledged policy platform, scheduled for today,
should generate some media interest but not much of a bump going forward. The
moment for Kada has come and gone in my view.

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About Me

After graduation, Jun Okumura promptly entered what is now the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and stayed in in its ecosystem most of his “adult” life. Along the way, he had pleasant stops in an assortment of Japanese quangos (Japangos?), overseas assignments and government agencies. After thirty years, though, it dawned on him that he had no aptitude whatsoever for administration and/or management. Armed with this epiphany, he went to the authorities and arranged an amicable separation; to come out, as it were. He is completely on his own IYKWIAS, but he and the METI folks remain “good friends.” He currently holds the titles of “visiting researcher” at the Meiji Institute for Global Affairs (no, that MIGA) and counselor at a risk analysis firm that dares not speak its name. This gives him plenty of time to blog or make money on his own. His bank account says that he does too much of the first, and insists that he do more of what he calls “intellectual odd jobs”. He wants to be paid to write fulltime, or better, talk—where the easy money is—but that distinction has largely escaped him. He really should not be referring to himself in the third person; he is not that famous.